Take The Long Way Home
by charleygirl
Summary: A2A. Crossover with Doctor Who. Alex thinks she's found the way home at last...


**Author's Note: _Ashes to Ashes_, set after Episode Eight. Crossover with _Doctor Who_.**

**Disclaimer: None of these characters belong to me. I'm just playing with them for a while.**

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**TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME**

When she sees it for the first time, she can't believe her eyes.

It is standing in Lime Street, right on the corner, battered and faded, its paint starting to peel. She looks around for the telltale signs of camera cables and lighting men, but there is nothing. No actors, not extras, no gaggle of interested onlookers. It looks real. The people on the pavement are ignoring it, moving around the obstruction automatically, as though they cannot even see it, but they know it is there.

"It's a sign. It has to be."

Back at the station, she pounces on Chris.

"I need information. The police box in Lime Street: I need the date of its erection."

Chris and Shaz both snigger at the word, and she's about to tell them to grow up when a familiar voice cuts across the laughter. Gene has overheard.

"What's this? A police box? This isn't Dixon of bleedin' Dock Green! The only use for those things these days is to house nutters with twenty foot scarves and tin dogs. Lay off the kids' telly, Bolly – there's proper police work to be done."

Of course, he doesn't realise the truth in his words. Alex just smiles, and mentally clicks her heels together.

_There's no place like home…_

She heads back to the corner after work, and the box is right where she left it.

When she knocks, the door swings open with a suitably dramatic creak. There's only darkness beyond, and she dithers on the threshold, wondering what will happen if she takes that chance and enters. Will she wake up back in 2008 straight away, or is this fantasy more complicated than that?

In the end, however, the decision is made for her, as there's quite suddenly someone there, in her personal space, and she fights down a shriek.

"Hello," that someone says breathlessly, his nose almost touching hers, "Can I help you?"

Alex takes an involuntary step backwards, stumbling over the edge of the box in her heels, out onto the pavement. The man remains in the doorway, not as tall as he'd like to be, an anachronism in green velvet that could have come from Carnaby Street in the sixties. He's watching her carefully, and, she realises, he's the wrong man. He should be blond and boyish, not worryingly attractive with dark curls that could rival her own perm.

"It's not right," she says aloud, trying to reason it out, "You should be Tristan from _All Creatures Great and Small_ by now. I used to watch it with Evan. Everything else fits, the fashions, the music, even Nookie Bear for goodness's sake! But you…you're completely wrong!"

The man looks down at himself, as if to check whether he might have changed on the spot, and then fixes her with a piercing pale blue gaze that sends a shiver down her spine. He points a long finger at her, and exclaims, "Alex Drake!" She waits, expectantly, but all he does is duck back inside the police box, muttering, "I really shouldn't be here."

"Wait!" She starts forward, but the door is closing. Her foot fits into the gap just in time. "I need your help!"

A long moment passes, and she feels her heart sinking into her boots. _Maybe not today, Molls_. Eventually, to her surprise the door opens again, and that tousled head appears. "Help?" he enquires, raising an eyebrow.

"I need to get home," she says simply.

His face crumples, ever so slightly. "I can't give that kind of help," he says, and the door shuts this time, giving Alex barely a second to remove her foot before she's left alone in the street.

Three days later, the police box is still there.

Chris reports that there is no record of one ever having been on Lime Street. He's had a few drinks with Shaz in a pub down there and he's never seen one. They've even driven past it in the Quattro and no one has passed comment.

Should she be surprised by this? Why would they be able to see it? Alex has built this world from her own imagination, her memories. No one else ever saw the clown, but he was real to her. Why should they see the police box? It's a sign for her, after all, not for them.

But she doesn't remember the man in the green coat, does she?

"You're in my head. You must have a purpose," she tells him when her knocks bring him to the door once more. "You have to be telling me something."

"I'm telling you that I'm only here because the TARDIS needs repairs. She jumped a time track and shorted out the dimensional stabilisers," he retorts incomprehensibly.

"This is all just a figment of my imagination. I've imagined you to take me back to 2008, back to my daughter," she insists. "You have to help me. That's why you're here."

He smiles slightly, the smile a little sad. "I wish that were true, if only because I've never been a figment of someone's imagination before and I'm sure it would be fascinating, but I'm not the way home, Alex. It doesn't work that way."

"I know I'm right," she tells him, and he shuts the door again.

"Still here, then," Alex says a week later, and he looks sulky.

"You try mending a dimensional drive system without the right parts," he tells her. "It's like fixing a laser gun with sellotape."

"I know why you're still here," she says triumphantly. "This is my world, and you can't leave it unless you take me with you."

"Alex, Alex, Alex," he sighs, "if that were really the case wouldn't I have welcomed you with open arms? I'm just an anomaly here, a rogue element over which you have no control. I'm not your way out – you still have that to find. Do you even know what you're doing here? Really?"

The question stops her in her tracks. In her mind's eye, the car explodes once more… "I thought…"

"Yes?"

"I thought I could save my parents…"

"But you couldn't, even though you tried so hard…" He smiles again, that sad, sad smile, and it matches his melancholy eyes, she realises. He's seen too much pain, too much trouble. Will she look like that eventually, if she never gets home? "You can't change history, Alex, not one line. Time will always find a way to thwart you."

"Then why am I here?" she asks in a small voice. "I want to go home. It's my daughter's birthday, she's waiting for me - "

"And she will continue to wait." He steps towards her, rests a hand on each of her shoulders and looks into her eyes. "You're Schrödinger's Cat, Alex, neither alive or dead until someone opens the box. But that someone isn't me, I'm afraid. You have to keep searching, keep fighting, and then you'll find the way home. I can't take you. I'm not part of this world." He nods at something behind her. "He is. Trust him. He's the one you need to get through this."

She looks, and sees Gene standing there on the other side of the road, watching her with what he's trying to make look like disinterest. When she turns back, the man in green is gone. All that's left is the police box, still standing on the corner, taunting her.

"I see you're now talking to yourself," Gene observes as he crosses the street. "I hear Bedlam's nice this time of year – shall I get Chris to book you a fortnight's holiday?"

"You have no idea what you're talking about," she tells him, even though she is grateful for his presence.

"No change there, then. I assume you are still on duty, or did I not notice the end of your shift approaching?"

She shakes herself, trying not to feel crushed by another escape route slipping through her fingers, and squares up to him. "What've you got, Guv?"

"Suspect package down at the docks. Bomb squad are on their way. Coming?"

She looks from him to the car, parked just down the road, and nods. "Of course."

So she follows him to the Quattro, leaving the police box behind, and she knows that if she looks for it tomorrow it won't be there. Her imagination is just as cruel as real life, raising her hopes only to dash them moments later. There's nothing she can cling to, except…she glances at Gene, at his stony, unsmiling profile as he throws the car round another corner at speed and she clutches the dashboard, and wonders…

….does she really want to get home?

Or does this world have some attraction after all?

FIN


End file.
